


Kindling

by philomel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dark, Episode: s05e04 The End, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:22:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philomel/pseuds/philomel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The End"-inspired character musing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kindling

He waits in shadows, like a discarded curse.

He doesn't belong here. Hope doesn't belong here, and he still carries a splinter of it under his skin, can rub his thumb over the bump of it, but can't pull it out — doesn't dare to pull it out. It's too late for dares. He's not a kid.

He was never a kid — just something stuffed into a small shape, shifting as it grew, accommodating, filling out to fit in. It doesn't matter what he was before; he barely remembers it. He was born out of fire. Call him a phoenix; it's just words. Fire and flight. Fight and wait.

Wait and follow.

Something's catching up with him. Sometimes it's someone. Maybe it has always been some _thing_ in the shape of some _one_. He's not calling him a monster; it's just a word. It's just another thing that's broken, here, where there are no more roads to cross. He could lay himself out on sticks and stones, a sacrifice. Light a match and watch him burn back down to who he was before, in a different life. Burn down to that splinter that won't budge. Burn that too. Start clean.

Don't start at all.

Maybe the world was always going to come to this. But if he wasn't here now, he wouldn't know. And that quickens his heart — scares him and thrills him and pushes him forward.

His skin catches on brick, his fingertips settling into the groove of smooth mortar. The wall is graffitied with blood he can't see. He can feel his way. He can find his way back in the dark. But he can't kill this memory. What he has built out of destruction. What he's built out of. The memory will stick just under his skin, shaping him, like the bones of old ghosts, like the skeletal remnants of ghost towns, like the knobby joints of match heads before they start the fire.

Death clicks its jaws, and his teeth chatter beneath his cold lips.

He's nothing but skin and bone. And he knows what it's like to burn.


End file.
